Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 2
Some of my friends look at me like I’ve grown a second head when I tell them what I’m up to, especially when I tell them that I’m doing this with hand planes. This is probably not new to many readers of this blog, but I thought I’d share how this is really not as much manual labor as you might think.
Here’s a picture of how out of square the beam I was working on this morning was.
That’s out 1/16” over the 3-1/2” width of the beam. Boy do I suck!
Now, when most people think of hand planes, the image of a finely tuned plane making those 0.001”, wispy, see-through shavings that just float in the air immediately comes to mind for most people. We don’t need no girly-man plane like that for this job.
I have a jack plane set up with a decent amount of camber and set for an aggressive shaving. This is the shaving that I get with this plane.
Just under 1/100” thick, and it falls straight to the ground. Japanese plane aficionados like myself would be horrified at such a thing. But this is important for this purpose.
Remember, I need to knock down 1/16” to get the faces square. 1/16” = 0.0625”. If my plane takes a shaving 0.009” thick, it should take me only 7 swipes of the plane to take off 1/16” of material. This is what I got after 9 swipes. (I got excited.)
Not too bad! And easier than trying to put an eight foot long 4x4 back on my jointer. Not to mention the lack of dust and noise.
My beam is eight feet long, as I said. I can work on a 2 foot section at a time, so 4 rounds of this and I have the whole beam squared up.
If they are going to remake 21 Jump Street, they need to have an Asian undercover cop.
Maebiki, by Lenox
I’m due for a new bandsaw blade, and I’ve been looking at trying out a bimetal bandsaw blade to get a longer lasting blade. These blades are typically made by laminating a piece of high speed steel to a carbon steel backing to form the teeth of the blade. I was marveling at this modern application of welding technology, and then I saw something on my maebiki that I hadn’t really noted before.
In these photos, you can clearly see a lamination line between the teeth and the main body of the maebiki. I took a small file to test the metal making up the tooth line and the metal making up the body of the saw, and they are clearly different types of steel, with the body being considerably softer than the tooth line.
This makes sense to me. Most Japanese saws are made from a single piece of hard steel, hammered out into the shape needed to make a ryoba, katana, or dozuki. If this same principle was applied to a maebiki, it would be a huge waste of steel, and would probably make the saw too brittle to use, given its size and thickness.
Now if I find a Japanese saw with carbide cutters welded to the tips of the teeth, I’ll be really impressed.
By the way, if anyone has recommendations on bandsaw blades that I should consider, please feel free to leave a comment. I like what I’ve read about the Lenox Diemaster 2, but I wish it came in a 1/2” x 0.025” 3 tpi configuration. The Lenox Tri-Master does have this configuration, but is quite a bit pricier.
Of all the “Shit Girls Say” parodies out there, you knew I was going to link to this one.
Note: the end credits are way too long. You can stop watching after 2:06. But the blooper reel is worth the time.
The Happiest And Unhappiest Cities To Work In
Gee — I always think the Popular Woodworking Magazine folks look like they have a lot of fun.
If you happen to work in Cincinnati, Buffalo, or Austin and you’re constantly down in the dumps—don’t worry. You’re not alone.
These three cities are where some of the nation’s unhappiest workers are, according to online career site CareerBliss.com.
Q:I think the other good thing to remember about a Roubo bench is that the weight provided by that extra bookcase of lumber is an important part of the design in and of itself. The stability you get from it is worth the extra board feet.
Yup. Although there are ways to immobilize a workbench besides sheer mass.
Still, having that big slab of wood to work on is awesome.
